Chapter 21 - Evaluation: Benefits, Facts and Myths
• The organization that evaluates sees what it is doing. Those that don’t evaluate can’t know if they are helpful. Evaluation must be simple and regular, with methods that serve the clients, the professionals and the volunteers.
Chapter 22 - Information Systems for Client Benefit
• We are in the information age where data systems give the ability to manage and learn. While computers can help the human services organization, early applications should be small and developed for and by the users.
Chapter 23 - Human Services: The Way Forward
• The human services are falling behind the fast changing community. This shift can be reversed by small, local, new service projects to test what will help clients best.
Chapter 24 - Leading: the Whole Living Picture
• The leader has a unique overview of the total operations. Using these practical models, tested in practice, the leader can view all the parts and how they can work together for client benefit. Leaders need maps to steer the course.
Chapter 25 - Project New Hope: The Handbook Model
• Here we have the special service program where the practices of this Handbook were fully applied. Research results show outstanding achievements by the families, their children and the program personnel.
About the Author
Introduction
The Complete Leader handbook is for professionals and volunteers with leadership responsibilities in the main human services sectors: health, education, welfare, community services, churches and arts organizations. The handbook provides proven leadership practices from three decades of development and use in the fields of children’s mental health and family services.
Each of the Chapters stands on its own and evolved directly from practice with clients. They have been developed, tested, evaluated and in use for services and training across North America. Taken together, the contents of the Chapters form a holistic matrix demonstrating the full scope of nonprofit leadership.
We believe this handbook is unique because:
• Each practice comes from current use.
• The practices are applicable to the full range of human services—health care, social services, education, and community service and arts organizations.
• Each practice has been evaluated and passed through a goal-setting filter.
• A holistic model shows the full picture of nonprofit leadership and its key parts.
• Orchestra leading is a metaphor for this model—the leader, with her charts, has a picture of the whole production and the harmony of all parts.
• Nonprofit leadership requires a combination of professional practices, client services and organizational skills.
The Complete Leader handbook demonstrates this.
Section I: The Leader
Susan is the nurse supervisor on a ward of the general hospital. She is responsible for the oversight of 12 nurses, who work in three shifts. Most days she is near her wits’ end. She has doctors breathing down her neck. She has the charts and paperwork that just grow every day. Then, Susan has the working lives of a dozen nurses, who are good family members, well trained and doing their best for the patients.
There are daily patient issues, prescription problems, grumpy patients, chart confusions, and debates about care. Susan must decide when to intervene or not, when to give direction and when to back off. She is often lonely—she can’t be one of the gang. Susan is a leader. She is sometimes stuck with unflattering labels.
Susan discovers this handbook on leadership. She believes it is unique in the body of leadership literature because its chapters are based entirely on practices that have been applied and tested over time. She reads that leading is about enabling those serving clients to do their jobs well. She understands that her job has two big parts: seeing that the jobs are done and taking care of the nurses.
From the handbook, Susan also realizes that she is the only one who has the picture of the whole program. That helps her decision-making to have focus on the mission and fairness. She knows that the quality of her leadership directly affects the quality of the service to the clients.
From the handbook, Susan knows that her first job is the quality of the relationships she has with the team of nurses. She is in the people business. Susan’s style will shape the quality of service in the entire ward.
Section II: The Client
At home, Jim, a carpenter, and his wife, Marie, know they are the leaders of the family. They have no training in leading. Yet they expect that some of their children will become leaders. They know that family life has to do with raising children, but they are not so sure how to raise leaders. This handbook will help parents by providing teaching on leadership for those who want to exemplify good leadership as they guide their children to reach their full potential as leaders.
Jim and Marie are well aware of the risks facing their children. The daily news makes this evident. They also feel that forces like business, government and media are fragmenting their family. These forces do not seem primarily concerned about family life or even the well-being of the individual. Families face the budget squeeze from a poor economy and less job security.
This family is surrounded in its community by many helpful organizations—schools, churches, hospitals, social services, counseling clinics and community service organizations. Families may have difficulty making use of these organizations that seem impersonal, bureaucratic and puzzling.
When they were growing up, Jim and Marie did not have this problem, because they knew the family doctor, the minister and the teacher personally. Suddenly, these professionals now work under the umbrella of an organization that is usually big and growing. While the professionals are competent and caring, their systems are often stiff.
When Jim’s and Marie’s parents needed help, they sought it from familiar places. Now, there are waiting lists and appointments. When visiting a professional, sometimes Jim and Marie get the help they need. But too often the contact leads to a referral to another organization. This referral process proves difficult to navigate. They take their place on a new list. When they get an appointment, they have to tell their story all over again. Strangely, the first organization does not pass its information on to the next.
If their problem is about a child’s school performance, then after a school meeting, Jim and Marie might be referred to a reading specialist, a psychologist or a psychiatrist. This process can easily take three months.
The recommendation may be ultimately quite helpful, but the family realizes that often the helping organizations involve families in routines that are too slow, too complicated and too chancy. They see that all these organizations are not working together. Jim and Marie see the big gap, as families must travel from one organization to the next. When they finally get to the right services, there is no assurance that any agency will stick with them as long as they need it.
Our bizarre situation is that the family, the institution with by far the greatest impact on the character of children, is disconnected from its community sources of help. The leaders of our most vital institution, the family, have their hands tied behind their backs in their job of being parents. They have difficulty finding the help that they need. Nobody seems to focus on their roles and skills as family leaders.
Services offered to this family need to be accessible and connected. The agency’s range of services can include residential, school-based, counseling, home care training and information. The greater